Drawing on a childhood spent on half-pipes and the basketball court, the Raf Simons protégé crafts streamlined clothes for a new kind of rule breaker

Provenance: Born in frenetic Beijing, Li moved to Perth, a sleepy city in western Australia, at age 10. "As far as culture is concerned, there's not much tradition or history there," says Li, now based in London. "I played a lot of sports and did all the things Australians do. I spent 10 years thinking, I need to get out of here."

Good Sport: Li spent his "isolated" teenage years in Perth playing basketball and skateboarding. "Those were my routes into fashion," he says. "When you play basketball or when you skate, how you wear your jeans and which graphic is on your skateboard is important—it's so much about style and expression. Studying fashion was justifying this interest, really, and applying it in a more conventional way." His athletic roots crept into his buzzed-about spring 2012 debut, which included razor-sharp double-face construction (a technique that's similar, Li notes, to the way skateboards are structured using multiple layers of superthin plywood), sporty techno fabrics, and elongated proportions (skater-boy sagging?) applied to tops, skirts, and jackets.

Belgian Master: The greatest lessons Li gleaned from his internship in Simons' Antwerp atelier? "To keep a cool head and the ability to design on demand as the industry requires. You have three months to make a collection, so you really have to be organized. It's a maturity, I guess, which I'm still crafting."

Of The Essence: "For me, a good designer is someone who proposes things at the right time," Li says. "That means having good knowledge of context—what's been and what's there right now—and then asking, `What can I say right now that's interesting?' " For Li, this led to blending couture­-esque craftsmanship with stark, precision-cut shapes that have a dis­tinctly '90s-minimalist feel. "The '90s was the modern moment when people were freaking out about nylon and the future. I wanted to represent those things, but in a luxurious way."

Oi, Oi, Oi!: Li sees his collection, dubbed Zero Hour, as an exercise in subtle rebellion. Classic shirts have been sliced down the back and stapled together with a single stitch; jacket sleeves lopped off; hem lengths dropped. "It's this idea of the inner punk: In this day and age, it's no longer shocking or intelligent to react with something deemed `shocking,' " Li says. "Rather than wearing a Metallica shirt or a biker jacket, to me it's more punk if a young person wears a double-face garment or a T-shirt that's cut open in the back, you know?"

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